Implementing Home-Control Applications on Service Platform

The convergence of smart field devices and business services stands to profoundly change the way we interact with our environment. However, implementing and maintaining home-control applications is still far from easy. This paper discusses how service-oriented concepts can facilitate the development of home-control applications. Moreover we present an open architecture to implement these applications. A prototype of service platform for home-control is presented to illustrate the approach and its benefits. define their capabilities, requirements and properties in an agreed (standard) machine-readable format. Based on service descriptions, automated service discovery, selection and binding is made possible in a service-oriented architecture. We believe that service orientation provides the level of flexibility that is required to build advanced applications in the home context. However, a number of challenges still have to be tackled. In particular, mechanisms are needed to build truly dynamic applications that can integrate new conditions at run- time. Most current service-oriented applications are not dynamic after the initial binding phase. Also, the thorny heterogeneity problem remains. Mechanisms are needed to allow applications to transparently use devices or networks based on various technological stacks. This paper addresses the two above-mentioned challenges. It presents an open computing infrastructure for home services and, more specifically, a dynamic home control gateway seamlessly integrating distributed services based on different technologies. The gateway is based on the OSGi™ standard (see www.osgi.org) and currently integrates Jini (6) and DPWS (7) service. This work is carried out in cooperation with Schneider Electric (owner of Square D - see www.squared.com). The rest of the paper is organized as follow. First service-oriented computing is presented. Then the motivation of using service-oriented computing to build home control applications is discussed. This is followed by a description on the design of our home-control applications and how they interact with heterogeneous devices. Then a presentation of the gateway's implementation is discussed. Finally, we conclude by pointing out major contributions of this paper and ongoing works.